Seth Godin wrote blog post today on conference call “hygiene.” I couldn’t agree more with what he says, as usual. This blog post brought up a reader’s perceived necessity of long-duration conference calls in telecommuting companies. What’s a telecommuting company, you ask? I’d posit that it’s any company with a significant percentage of the workforce that works remotely. Ok, so how does telecommuting actually go down?
Here’s an incorrect equation, for starters:
telecommuting == conference calls
Bzzzzt! Wrong answer. It doesn’t matter if your company is not in the tech industry – there is no excuse not to take advantage of the plethora of telecommute-enhancing technologies that are readily available. As soon as you start introducing telecommuting into your business operations, you automatically need to increase your company’s technical infrastructure in order to remain productive and effective. And, it doesn’t have to be a big deal.
Beg for forgiveness; don’t ask for permission.
The best way to improve your telecommuting tech infrastructure is to just try things out. Don’t have another series of conference calls with Head of XYZ Department and their subcommittees. Find out what works for you and your team(s). Nine times out of ten, if you find the right person with the proper power and a company credit card, they can make things happen – maybe that person is even you.
Try out technologies on small projects before bringing it to your mega e-commerce production team, and then get others onboard. Investigate what some of the top companies in the tech industry are using, and then try out those technologies. What’s more, several of the technologies that improve telecommuting are either free or offer free trials.
Ok, so what are some of these technologies? Here are some of my favorites, many of which we use at the Drupal web/creative agency that I own, Origin Eight.
Basecamp – An online portal that is engaging and easy to use for even the most non-technical users, since it can optionally be quite email-driven. Set milestones; keep track of who’s doing what; don’t let another email get lost – keep your (searchable) discussions in Basecamp; document things; keep all of your project-related files attached to a single project; attach Google Docs; forward emails to Basecamp for those people who refuse to use it (at first). It’s life-changing, purposefully simplistic, and something I use to track pretty much every longer-term thing in my daily life. Need more features for managing larger-teams? Try Roadmap, which integrates with Basecamp and adds all the fancy Gantt charts, resource scheduling and things, or one of the many other integrations or “extras“.
Google Hangout – When you really need face-to-face time virtually, try this out instead of a conference call. A conference call is like this awfully hilarious-yet-accurate video; Google Hangouts are a bit better.
join.me or Skype – I like the user interface and overall user experience of join.me much better for conference calls involving visual demos and screen sharing (even better than WebEx, potentially), whereas Skype offers a more multimedia-rich chat client that is universally adopted around the world. If you’re going to do extended group chat or have a longer call, at least share your screen or guide everyone through something visual in order to make the conversation useful to the group.
Hipchat – For any teams that require group communication yet are already quite overloaded with email…just start using it. I’m serious — download it and invite a few people and give it a try. Now! There is no better group chat client that I’m aware of. Yes, there is IRC; yes, Yahoo and everyone else offers some version of group chat. This, however, is different. You can invite people who aren’t on Hipchat into a public room to chat about something in 2 minutes that might require 20 emails or a 20-minute conference call. You can configure how and when it notifies you, including on your smartphone as a push notification. You can break out conversations into separate rooms, controlling privacy and focusing discussion to relevant parties, all while maintaining a persistent chat history. Just. Download. It. Yes, it costs money – are you one of those people who uses a free conference call service that inspired the video I referenced above? Get some money in the budget for Hipchat for next year.
Google Chat – Use a nice chat client like Messages for Mac or Adium for Windows along with something like Google Chat. Yes, keep the corporate chat app running if your company requires you to use one, but then chat with your team however you’re most comfortable to Get Things Done, as long as the information you’re discussing doesn’t have word-altering security implications.
Google Apps – Turn on two-step authentication and use Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, and the plethora of apps available. Set up filters in Gmail to screen out or categorize email. Don’t email around documents for editing – use Google Docs to collaboratively edit. Another nice related solution is that which Zoho offers.
CRM – A Customer Relationship Management tools is important for sales leads. Don’t have a call to discuss leads – track them, and then communicate and schedule through the CRM. Some nice CRM solutions are Highrise, Sugar CRM, Zoho, Salesforce…there are many. Try one out and see which is best for your company. I personally like Zoho CRM as it offers good functionality at a great price (free to start) for smaller businesses, as well as Highrise for its 37 SIgnals (Basecamp) integration.
Box or Dropbox for Business – Share files. Don’t email them. Basecamp isn’t a proper storage archive for certain types of files, and Google Drive can be cumbersome and less-easily adopted. Use a service such as these to share files with your team, and keep them in one place. Oh, and don’t store super-secure information here unless you have an encrypted, password-protected hard drive: if your computer is stolen, so are your files.
Passpack – Email is unsafe and prone to hacking. Don’t email passwords. Google Docs are unsafe unless everyone has 2-step verification enabled; and even then, still iffy. Share passwords and other important credentials securely with something like Passpack.
DoneDone – Use a bug or task tracker if you are in the software industry. Don’t email tasks and bugs to your developers in spreadsheets, and then send hundreds of emails clarifying the things you send in the spreadsheet. They will want to die. DoneDone is highly user-friendly, has enough features for the great majority of companies (don’t overwhelm project managers and producers with overly-complex bug trackers that have fields they don’t use and functionality that makes them frustrated to the point that they email things to developers in spreadsheets). Also, if you have them, you can involve technical clients in the QA process if you use something nice and friendly like DoneDone. Asana is also a really, really amazing tool for task tracking, if Basecamp doesn’t make sense in certain contexts, and if DoneDone feels too technical. Some people like Trello, too.
An intranet – There is no link here, since there are so many. Get an intranet, and document things like policies, the technology you use, information that you would otherwise have to onboard or convey to new people during conference calls. Use Google Sites. Confluence. Open Atrium. The list goes on. Get one, get people onboard and adopting it, and use it. Document important things.
Honorable mentions – Use something like Rightsignature (my favorite thus far) or PandaDoc (still new but very promising) for signing and sending templated legally binding documents to and from your remote workforce and clientele. Seriously, don’t type up, scan, manually sign and do all that crap by hand. Stop it. Also, for time-tracking, I recommend Harvest. For invoicing you really ought to try Freshbooks. Campfire might work for some people instead of Hipchat. Onboarder is also a really neat web app for onboarding new talent, so that you can create checklist tasks for the new person as well as your staff, centralize info relevant to onboarding, and even automatically create new user accounts in various integrated apps. This could save several introductory conference calls. There are many more that might help remote workers for your particular business – give the internet a surf!
Use the right tool for the right job. Don’t expect any one tool to do everything. –Me
In summary, based on my experience, I find that long-duration conference calls are a result of a lack of modern infrastructure. People seriously use free conference call providers in order to save the company a few dollars on a conference call that is costing the company hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost productivity and forfeited time. This thinking is backwards, unsustainable, and inconsiderate of any telecommuting company to its workforce and stakeholders. Build some level of telecommuting infrastructure, and then have company policies and documentation to support your infrastructure.
I find that a great number of conference calls are often organized by wishful thinkers who are so overwhelmed by email already that they hope and pray that a conference call will take less time and be less overwhelming than their inbox; but, in reality, it’s just a break in their day to switch away from email that they impose on everyone else. Ask your company for help in delegating some of your duties if you are truly that overwhelmed. Even a $15/hr Craigslist intern. And then work on how you can delegate. This very infrastructure will help you delegate. I bet you could give that intern this article, set them on a technology demo spree, have them set you up with the most promising ones, and proceed to save your company an exponentially greater and increasing amount of time and money.
Seth Orion Viebrock 